Palin pick invokes American innocence myth

By ANTHONY B. ROBINSON
GUEST COLUMNIST

ONE OF THE OLDEST strands of American thought is the myth of American inno-

cence. The first settlers from Europe left the "Old World," thought to be corrupt and ex-

hausted, for the "New World," a kind of American Eden. American movies, from John Wayne Westerns to "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," regularly invoked the theme of a unique American innocence and virtue.

The myth of American innocence portrays America and Americans as fresh and untainted by the ancient wiles and deceptions of others. It imagines that Americans have a combination of virtue, tenacity and practical knowledge that will allow them to prevail where others have failed.

One way to understand both John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin and the Palin phenomenon is in the context of this myth of American innocence.

Now Washington (the other Washington) is the corrupt Old World. McCain depicts himself as an outsider and maverick to the Washington establishment. But it is Palin that completes the evocation of the myth of American innocence.

more:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/380776_faith27.html

Palin were unblemished. Instead, she typifies the worst of Washington, moved out into the sticks.

Wrong dude, the GOP are employing their propaganda ministry to full effect.

You don't have to go all the way back to an innocent America; the GOP are liars.

No need to dress it up, somehow justify it with a mythology.

The GOP are liars, they lie, it's what they do.

Period.

Just a moron with the worst fav/unfav ratio of the 4 candidates.

American ignorance. I wonder where this writer has been living the last 8 years?

... in this case, Sarah Palin. That accounts for a lot of her initial popularity, for the fascination she had for so many. My next-door neighbor sees her that way. That doesn't mean that she IS all those things. Do you see the distinction? A myth is not a person, although a person may embody a myth.

Barack Obama also embodies a type of American mythology, more complex in its way than the one projected onto Sarah Palin. If and when he becomes President he is bound to disappoint because he can't BE all that is projected onto him.

Anyone who is the object of a mass societal projection and who ends up believing it or even tries too hard to embody it, will inevitably crash and burn. Eva Peron and Marilyn Monroe were both like that, although the projections were different due to their different roles.

This is a good article. We here at DU are better off for trying to understand the Palin phenomenon, even as it fades, than we are for dismissing it. There will be other Palins coming along.

Hekate

> The greatest recent examination of the myth has been Graham Greene's 1955 novel "The Quiet American." In it Greene exposes the havoc set in motion by one U.S. innocent, Alden Pyle, in Vietnam. As it turned out, Greene's novel was prophetic, anticipating America's tragic engagement in a conflict it never really understood. When "The Quiet American" was released as a movie in 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, it again sounded an alarm and anticipated what happens when power and innocence are wed.
>
> The problem with the myth of American innocence, as Greene showed, is that it renders its victims blind. Claiming to see clearly, the innocents are blind to the complexities of the world, but more important, blind to their own limitations and capacity for evil. The myth locates all sin and evil elsewhere and in others. This is part of the reason that Christian fundamentalism strives so steadily to convert or, if that fails, cast out gays. They represent the foreign body, the corruption of innocence.
>
> Barack Obama might also be thought to be appealing to the myth of American innocence, given his idealism and invocation of hope. Yet if you listen to Obama, you hear something different. It is not innocence but idealism that is at the core of his message. Obama has also frequently spoken of himself and his campaign as "imperfect," which further separates him from the theme of American innocence. Obama's acknowledgments of imperfection owe something to his reading of the American Christian theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Obama described as his "favorite philosopher." Niebuhr was a great critic of the myth of American innocence, and ceaselessly pointed to its dangers. Niebuhr rejected all utopias, whether of the "back-to-Eden" or the futuristic variety, arguing that the best we could hope for in this life was proximate justice and incremental improvement.
>
> While some versions of Christianity, particularly fundamentalist ones, have linked themselves to the myth of American innocence, this is not orthodox Christian thought. A better summation of that may be found in the aphorism of the French essayist and Christian, Pascal, who wrote, "The world is divided between sinners who believe themselves to be saints, and saints who know themselves to be sinners." The sinners who believe themselves saints are altogether too sure of their own innocence and virtue.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/380776_faith27.html

:kick:

Hopefully more people can read the whole thing and reflect instead of react.

Hekate

:kick:

Hadn't heard that before. But unfortunately, this sort of stuff doesn't play well here. I do think he has a point about Americans and how they seem to think that having someone "just like us" is a good thing. Most of the greatest leaders in American history have been very uncommon- Washington, Jefferson, both Roosevelts, Kennedy....I would suppose Lincoln was the exception, but he had an intelligence that would have been called "elitist" by today's Repub party. Why people would not want someone exceptional to lead them is worth extended discussion, and it has played a role in all of the elections of the past 30 years. Yes, even Clinton, Rhodes scholar that he was, downplayed his intelligence during the 92 election and HW Bush did not.

It's nothing new, although it is now in the ascendent. What really disturbs me is how "elite" has been redefined as ANYONE with a college education, instead of just those born with a silver spoon in their mouths. How the hell did Obama and Biden -- much less you and I -- become "elites" and G. Dumbya Bush of the BFEE escape that label? Propaganda only works if it has something to work with.... :eyes:

Someone else wrote an article about Palin that attempted to explain how Americans traditionally have held this idea of people working with their hands in trades without a lot of formal education as being the reservoir of Common Sense; versus the college educated with an urban sensibility as being somehow effete and out of touch. I don't seem to have saved that article, which is too bad because I am not doing very well explaining it. But as it accords with what Anthony Robinson is saying about our American mythology, I think you will get it.

We live in myths without realizing it, any more than a fish realizes it lives in water, and there's all kinds of cross currents in any culture. Obama is not the same kind of "outsider" as Palin is: he is "the Other". Notice that his home state was called "exotic" at one point, but hers is refreshingly frontier-like.

Thanks for the post. This time I'm saving it. :hi:

Hekate